The customer journey begins at first touch, usually a web page or an advertisement, and it concludes when the value of the delivered good or service has been used by the customer. Some customer journeys are terrible. For example: waiting on hold for too long, not being able call if you need help, and general disorganization that leaves customers wondering, “Who do I contact if something goes wrong?” or being pushed and pulled through a thousand departments. To avoid negative experiences, your business needs to consciously, specifically, intentionally try to map and manage the customer journey to identify opportunities for improvement. Customer journey management refers to all intentional action taken to understand, optimize, and design the various interactions and touchpoints that a customer will have with a brand or business from beginning to end.
Steps of Customer Journey Management
Customer Journey Management is interdepartmental by nature. It generally follows the pattern:
- Marketing will curate awareness with the first digital and physical touchpoints through advertisements, emails, website visits, social media engagement, in-store experiences, or word of mouth based on a reputation built through years of podcasting and journalist pitching. This is often referred to as top-of-funnel work.
- When a customer’s attention is captured, they must consider the value proposition. Marketing or Sales will take a process of understanding the customer’s needs, demonstrating the technical features, and negotiating the final contract.
- In the final stages, the prospect is converted to a customer. The customer is handed over to an implementation, account management, or post-sales. There, delivery and problem resolution are needed.
Post Sales: an opportunity to distinguish your business
There has been a well-documented trend of vanishing phone support among software, medical, and financial services. For example, Frontier Airlines no longer offers live agents, and it explicitly said to shareholders that chatbots are better because they eliminate the customer’s ability to negotiate. Another obvious example is Amazon and Apple, which still offer phone support but discourage its use by redirecting the consumer to articles and prompts before directing them to the right phone number.
One aspect of my post-sales experiences that I personally have found irritating has been the trend of making a quasi-salesperson the point of contact for questions about the software or program. This has resulted in me having to go through someone whose job is to upsell to get tech support when my B2B software malfunctions. The distinction between customer service and sales should be made clear. The post-sales phase is a crucial opportunity for your business to distinguish itself with a customer-centric mindset.
Specialized Support Channels: Maintain dedicated channels for technical support, separate from sales-oriented interactions. This ensures that customers can quickly access assistance without being directed through sales processes.
Transparent Communication: Clearly communicate the support process to customers, including how to reach technical support directly. Transparency builds trust and helps manage customer expectations, reducing frustration.
Hire a Customer Journey Manager
One of the best ways to manage the customer journey is by hiring someone whose core responsibility is to oversee that cycle. A Customer Journey Manager would perform data analytics, cross-functional collaboration, feedback collection, and customer journey mapping. This would be a professional listener who ensures that customer feedback gets back to the product team, that Marketing is advertising what is most impactful in the Sales room, et cetera. Correcting silos is a great way to ensure your customers are satisfied.
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